quIRC

A console-based IRC client

What is it?

is a lightweight IRC client that lives in a terminal, such as a console (eg. tty1) or a terminal emulator (eg. xterm or rxvt). It uses terminal escape sequences to provide a clean character-cell based interface, handling things like multiple channels and servers (using tabs), input line editing (with bash-like keystrokes), and backscroll.

In terms of handling the IRC protocol, it's nearly complete (it ignores DCC, and large chunks of ISUPPORT, but that's about all) - essentially all the important stuff (that is, the only stuff you use 99.9% of the time) works. quIRC is 8-bit clean and UTF-8 capable.

Where is it?

You can also get help with quIRC from #quirc on irc.newnet.net (run quirc --server=irc.newnet.net --chan=#quirc) - also go there to discuss future direction, new features etc.

What systems will it run on?

quIRC should compile on Linux, Mac OS X, and most other Unices.

quIRC is chiefly developed on an x86 machine running Debian Linux.

What does it look like?

Here are some images of quIRC in action:

quIRC 0.4.0 with several tabs open.

quIRC 0.4.17 sporting the Top Status Bar.

quIRC 0.7.9 with timestamps and more.

Credits

Thanks to Pascal Bleser for several fixes.
Also helpful in a different way was polomint, who found many bugs and misbehaviours.
A swathe of portability issues were found by rofl0r; for these also I am grateful.

While the author of this site has taken care to make it interoperable (through minimalism of design and adherence to standards), you are nonetheless recommended to use an opensource browser such as Mozilla Firefox.